Luke 24.13-35
April 26 MMXX
I.
There is a sense in which our whole existence is a journey with a God whom we do not recognize. Each Sunday we make an affirmation that comes from the Orthodox liturgy, proclaiming that “Christ is in the midst of us!” and that “He is and ever shall be!” At the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus assures his disciples: “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The continued living Presence of Jesus Christ with us is something we talk about and say we trust in; but it is not readily apparent to us all the time, or even most of the time. Because most of our days on this journey we do not recognize him. Usually he appears to us as a stranger, an other.
If Christ is a stranger, someone whom we do not realize is God’s Presence in the midst of us, we can find ourselves in the confused, crestfallen, concerned attitude of these two disciples. Things happen, but we don’t understand what they mean. We don’t know what to believe. It is hard to sort truth from propaganda and lies. We yo-yo from high hopes to despondency and depression. We are jerked around by the machinations of political leaders and forces that do as they please, exerting whatever cynical violence they want in order to protect their own position and carry out their own agendas.
Without recognizing the living Presence of the Lord in the midst of us, a lot of our life seems fruitless. Prayer, worship, meditation, spiritual practices and disciplines… they may feel like wastes of our time. At best we imagine we are deriving some physical or psychological benefit from them. We are making contacts, fulfilling obligations, covering our bases, burnishing an image.
And the best we can do to make sense of our lives is to try and piece together a coherent story based on the facts as we understand them. That’s what’s going on with these disciples, walking slowly home from Jerusalem, seven miles, to the town of Emmaus, on the afternoon of the first day of the week during Passover. They are disappointed, despondent, depressed, and discouraged.
Back in seminary I learned that we are a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. That story is our identity. If we keep telling ourselves something then that is what we will be. If it’s a negative story of loss, failure, defeat, victimization, and disability, that is what we will continually live into. Our life will only make sense to us when we frame it in these terms. Things that happen that don’t fit into this narrative will be invisible, unrecognizable, incoherent, and dismissed as anomalies.
In one church I served there was a young woman with anorexia. No matter how much weight she lost, no matter how thin, gaunt, and skeletal she became, she would still see an overweight person in the mirror. Because mere facts and empirical observations were not powerful enough to counteract her interior personal narrative about who she was.
The narrative of these disciples includes great, tragic, and traumatic loss. Their hoped-for redeemer had been murdered in a public act of unspeakable terror and violence.
But there are also these odd anomalies, things that don’t quite fit into the story: the missing body and the women who say they encountered angels saying that Jesus is alive. None of which makes any sense. It doesn’t fit into the normal story of human existence.
II.
And they meet this apparently clueless stranger on the road. He doesn’t appear to know this story. Doesn’t he watch cable news? Isn’t he on Facebook? What podcasts does he listen to? How can anyone not know what happened in Jerusalem this weekend? How can anyone ignore the sad facts that reinforce again the standard narrative about human existence, that the world chews up and spits out anything good, true, beautiful, and wise? That there is no redemption, no salvation, no liberation in this life? The rich get richer, the strong stay in power by violence, and there is no hope.
That’s the story we are fed by our own egos and by the ruling Empire of every age in order to get us to keep working. If you want to get ahead in this life you have to take, grab, keep, and steal, and even kill. Your life is measured by how much you have. Other people are competitors for scarce resources, or enemies to be feared. The planet is yours to do what you want with. Wealth, power, and fame are what you should strive for. And the end you fear but never talk about is death. Extinction. Annihilation.
But this stranger on the road appears to know about some other story. The story he knows is not an unfamiliar story to these Jews, especially at Passover. They are aware of this other story; they can even recite it in detail. God liberates the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. God shapes a complaining, ignorant, ungrateful, volatile mob into a holy people, by giving them a Law, a way to live in peace and justice together and even be an example to the world.
The people keep falling and God keeps saving and redeeming them. God sends them prophets for correction and encouragement. Even after the near destruction of exile in Babylon, God again miraculously redeems, delivers, restores, and saves the people.
The story the stranger tells has to do with a lamb who is slain to save the people from death; a goat who is sacrificed to forgive and sanctify them, and another one who bears the sins of the people away; a servant who takes on the people’s wrongdoing and its consequences. In every case the revealed truth is that God is bringing light into our darkness, goodness out of our evil, and life from our death. This is even true from the very beginning when the Creator God speaks into being the beautiful and good universe, overcoming a formless, chaotic void.
The conclusion being that of course the Anointed One, the Messiah and Savior of Israel, would have to suffer, even taking on our death, in order to fulfill the divine vocation of deliverance, redemption, and liberation. Indeed, it is something that Jesus tells them several times during his ministry with them. It would even have been the centerpiece of his teaching, enacted in his healing of the sick and his inclusion of the outcast. This radical reversal, snatching victory from defeat, is God’s whole MO.
III.
These disciples know all this. But there is a big difference between knowing something cognitively and having something shape our whole life and behavior. Knowing a story is not living a story. A story has to get out of our brains and into our bodies. It has to become the story we live by, according to which we make our decisions. It is the difference between reading a book about how to dance, or play the guitar, or speak Chinese, and actually learning to do these things. It is the difference between talking the talk, and walking the walk.
It is the difference between talking about how Christ is in the midst of us, and living with and in his Presence together. For Christ invites us not just to think and talk about him, but to follow him and even become him.
How does that happen? In the story, the disciples reach their village. The stranger intends to keep walking on. They could have just let him go on his way. He would have become an interesting anecdote about this weird guy they met and engaged them in an interesting theological conversation. Remember that guy?
But the disciples actively and strongly invite the stranger to stay with them. He’s still just a stranger. But they show him hospitality. They welcome him, even cajole him, to remain with them. They want him to join them.
We have first of all to want to have this other story, this counter-narrative, this alternative way of seeing things enter into our lives. We have to want to change. We have to desire personal and even social and global transformation.
That transformation can start when we open ourselves to something new. We have to open our doors and our hearts to this stranger with a different story. That means letting go of our normal, reasonable fear of the other, and allowing a new and somewhat unknown influence into our home, into our heart. It means putting down our defenses and permitting this foreigner to invade us and permeate us. We have to feed him, share our table with him, offer him our bread, our sustenance. We have to cultivate his story and warm it over among ourselves, reflecting on it, letting it grow in us.
The stranger joins them at their dinner table. He takes some of the matzoh (for it is still Passover). He blesses it: "Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha olam, ha motzi lechem min ha aretz”. He breaks it. And he gives it to them.
This is a series of actions so characteristic of the Lord that they recognize him immediately. And it is the characteristic movement of real discipleship. We take, receive, accept, welcome, and lift up our life in God’s creation; we bless and offer heartfelt thanksgiving for all that we receive as a divine gift; then we break by losing it, letting it go, giving it up, and dying to the impulses that want to keep and hoard this for ourselves alone; and finally we give it by distributing what we have and sharing with all. It is the very action of sacrifice, and of love.
At that moment, we are told, their eyes are opened. They recognize him at last. And he immediately vanishes from their sight. He disppears because he is no longer separate from them and therefore visible to their mortal eyes.
To truly recognize him is to understand that he is always here and always has been, within them, in their midst. Indeed, he is always everywhere, for Christ is the imprint, the signature, the resonant echo of God’s Voice, the Word though whom all things are made, reverberating through all Creation.
IV.
The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, this ceremonial act of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread and wine representing and becoming for us the Body and Blood of the Lord, is the enactment of this other story, the true story, of everything.
When we eat his Body and drink his Blood, we are inviting him into us, our bodies, our lives, our world. It is an expression of our desire to become him. It means he lives in us now, and we in him. By this activity, his story — the story of the redemptive love at the heart of Creation — becomes our story.
That story is that in him no one is ever lost, no one is ever separated, no one is “other,” but all are one. There are no enemies. There is no “us” and “them.” There are no distinct nations, races, classes, sides, families, or even religions. All of that separation, opposition, hostility, and fear has been immolated and exhausted on the cross and washed away in our baptism. We now proceed into the world with a new story, as new people, as the Presence of Christ, truly human and truly God, for healing and reconciliation, sharing and forgiveness, justice and peace, hope and love, gratitude, wonder, and joy.
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